Genre: Survival Horror
Publisher: Gamecock Media Group
Developer: Renegade Kid
Release Date: October 31, 2007

I enjoy being scared. Now, I'm not talking about someone jumping out from behind a wall and surprising me. I enjoy true fear. It may seem weird, but I enjoy stories that focus on loneliness and hopelessness and not as much on surprises or cheap exploitation. It's something that's missing in our modern super-gory torture movies, such as "Saw" and "Hostel." That's why I get excited when a game like Dementium: The Ward comes along, blending an extremely creepy atmosphere with an equally creepy and scary story. Unfortunately, it's hampered by some pretty severe flaws that bring it down quite a few notches.

As the game opens, you wake up in a hospital bed. You don't know who you are or how you got there. You traverse the halls and realize that something is definitely wrong with the hospital. The walls are drenched with blood, and the only people you come across are these gross monstrosities that appear to be out for your blood. As you progress through Dementium, you unravel the hospital's terrifying mysteries and discover why you're there.

The shining point of Dementium is easily the atmosphere. Everything works together to cause uneasiness and fear as you play through the story. The title takes the Silent Hill route by assuming that it's what you don't see that scares you the most, and they're right. Practically the entire game takes place in the dark, with only a solitary flashlight beam to light up small pieces of the environment. Couple this with the sounds that resonate around you, and you're left with a truly spooky experience that is unrivaled on any portable system.

Dementium controls like a first-person shooter. You use the d-pad or face buttons to control your character and the stylus to aim. Attacking is handled with the shoulder buttons. The controls work well enough, but there are a couple of flaws. Aiming with the touch-screen takes a little getting used to, and it doesn't always seem to be fast enough when you're fighting some of the quicker enemies.

The graphics are about as good as you can ask for on a handheld. There are a lot of jagged edges, and the enemies look like they're out of early first-person shooters. The cut scenes are rendered with a neat blur effect that serves two purposes: making the cut scenes look great and adding to the player's sense of uneasiness.

The sound in Dementium is killer. Whether it's the music, the ambient sound or the occasional voice, everything is top-notch. You are definitely going to want to play this game with a pair of headphones because the DS speakers just don't do justice to the sound.

The game is split into 16 chapters, ranging from five minutes to an hour in length. Occasionally, after playing through a few chapters, you'll be confronted by a boss and have to figure out how to defeat it. After you beat the boss, you'll get whatever is needed to progress to the next area. It's all pretty standard stuff that you've done plenty of times before.

That isn't the only area in which you'll get the feeling of déjà vu. All of the puzzles seem as if they've been pulled directly out of past survival horror games. Whether it is the colored keycards or playing a piano to solve a puzzle, you've seen it before in other genre offerings. If you're new to the genre, you might find the puzzles interesting, but veterans will find most of the puzzle-solving to be pretty boring.

There are quite a few flaws in Dementium that keep it from being totally awesome, and, unfortunately, they're just annoying enough to have an adverse effect on your experience. The first drawback is a completely odd save system. The game automatically saves after you go through almost every door, which seems useful at first. If you shut down your DS, you'll start at the beginning of the last room you entered, but if you make a mistake in gameplay and die because of it, you have to replay as much as an hour of the game to get back to where you were.

One of the worst cases I experienced was after I had worked my way through an entire chapter, beaten a boss and obtained the final piece to a puzzle on which I'd been working. I then had to backtrack to the beginning of the area to collect an item. I died on the way back and had to redo everything, including the boss fight. Needless to say, it was a very, very frustrating moment for me.

Dementium also sports a very limited inventory system. You basically have two inventories: weapons and key items. Except for a couple of puzzles, the key item system is pretty useless. Tapping an item will tell you what it looks like and where you found it. The weapons system is displayed on the touch-screen and allows you to select weapons by tapping them. The real setback is the inability to collect extra health and ammo.

You'll find scores of the stuff lying around the hospital, but you can only take as much as you need, which means you can only carry as much ammo as will fit in your gun. You can max out your health, but don't count on any reserves. This becomes especially frustrating while fighting the bosses, which usually do more damage and require more bullets to take down.

I would be okay with these issues if it weren't for the worst flaw of the game: respawning enemies. Every time you walk through a door, the enemies you just killed come back, so if you left health in a supply closet and want to backtrack a bit to collect it, you'll have to fight all of the enemies again.

Dementium is also pretty linear, which is unfortunate. There is pretty much only one way to get through the hospital, and the game makes sure you know it by blocking every other path with vending machines and wheelchairs. While I can certainly understand that the designers wanted to tell a specific story, this destroys any replay value. Once you've played the game once, there's nothing else to do.

This is unfortunate because the title is only about five to six hours long. It's sort of understandable since it's a handheld game; it hasn't been designed to be played like a console game, with you sitting in an easy chair in front of your TV. This is a game that's designed to be played on the move, so at best, you probably get in 20 minutes at a time. Despite this, you might still feel a bit ripped off after beating it in such a short time and having absolutely nothing else to do with it, other than to go through it again.

I wanted to like Dementium: The Ward. I really did. Initial reports and videos showed a game that any horror fan could easily get behind. Unfortunately, the final product isn't nearly as great as it could have been. It's very scary, but it's held back by an annoying save system, limited inventory and respawning enemies. Fans of the genre will want to check it out for the atmosphere alone, but other gamers might want to save their money. There are other, more enjoyable games available for the DS.

Score: 6.5/10